| 
The morning begins not with sunlight filtering through the blinds, but with the shrill ringtone of a user calling at 7:43 a.m. because their password, forged from the Latin root of “impenetrable” and at least one hieroglyph, has suddenly become invalid. Still half-asleep and cradling a mug of yesterday’s coffee, the I.T. technician answers the phone with the gravitas of a surgeon. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is delivered with the same solemnity as a priest offering last rites.
By 8:30, he has performed the sacred ritual of rebooting a printer by slapping it until it either works or recognizes the futility of resistance. The printer is ancient, practically carbon-dating itself each time it grinds out a page. It lives in the supply room like a disgruntled goblin, demanding obscure toner cartridges that haven’t been manufactured since the Nixon administration. This particular morning it decides to go on strike, displaying the cryptic error message “Error 51: Ghost Jam Detected.” He opens every panel, checks every roller, sacrifices a Slim Jim to the tech gods, and finally, after whispering something in binary, it springs to life again. The receptionist hails him as a wizard.
His first official support ticket of the day is from Dave in accounting, who is convinced his monitor is broken because it’s “just black.” The technician arrives, presses the power button on the monitor, and is rewarded with the look of awe usually reserved for astronauts or shamans. Dave promises to name his next child after his new hero. He forgets the technician’s name within the hour, however.
Mid-morning brings an influx of emails from people whose idea of troubleshooting is staring harder at the screen until the problem fixes itself or they get a migraine. Karen from HR has clicked on a phishing link that asked for her login, home address, social insurance number, and a selfie with her driver’s license, and she proudly obliged. She even sent a follow-up email to the scammers asking if they needed her bank’s routing number. The technician gently removes the malware from her system while explaining—again—that the Nigerian prince probably does not, in fact, want to wire her six million dollars.
Just before lunch, someone’s spilled coffee into a keyboard and tried to dry it using a hairdryer on the “molten lava” setting. The keyboard has been fused into something that looks like a plastic fossil. The technician replaces it, but not before taking a photo for his growing gallery titled “Why I Drink.”
Lunch is a battlefield. Not the food itself, but the 23-minute window he gets to eat it before someone finds him with a frantic “I know you’re on lunch, but real quick…” followed by a problem that is neither quick nor real. Today’s “emergency” is a VP who wants to know why his laptop won’t connect to Wi-Fi, but has failed to notice he’s in an underground parking garage somewhere on the other side of the city. The technician politely suggests emerging into the 21st century—or at least back into the correct building.
The afternoon is reserved for system updates, which are to users what garlic is to vampires. Nothing elicits more panic than a message that says, “Your PC will restart in 15 minutes.” The technician receives three calls and one handwritten letter begging him to stop the apocalypse. “What if I lose everything?” a user cries. He asks if their files are saved. They respond with a noise somewhere between a sneeze and a confession.
At 3:00 p.m., a developer pings him to report that their virtual machine is running slow. He opens the system to find 370 Chrome tabs, four concurrent video streams, a game of Minesweeper, and a VPN connected to a server in Antarctica. He recommends closing anything non-essential. The developer closes Minesweeper and waits.
Around 4:15, the big boss has a Zoom call with a client, and the webcam won’t turn on. After twenty minutes of polite troubleshooting, it is discovered that a sticky note labeled “DO NOT FORGET MEETING” has been placed over the camera lens. The boss nods and says, “Technology, man,” as if the computer were gaslighting him.
As 5:00 approaches, he begins to dream of home, of silence, of a moment without the sound of Outlook notifications or the dull hum of fluorescent lights. But just as he’s about to pack up, an “urgent” ticket comes through marked Critical Priority 1. It turns out someone changed their desktop background and now can’t find any of their files. “They’re gone!” they sob over the phone. “Everything’s gone!” He remote-connects, right-clicks the Recycle Bin, and restores the “missing” folder. The user calls it a miracle. He calls it Wednesday.
He leaves the building finally, after plugging in four laptops, replacing a blown switch, and fielding one last question from someone who believes “the cloud” is an actual floating mass above the office. The technician doesn’t correct them. He lets them have this one. Let them believe their photos are stored in a cumulonimbus hovering somewhere above marketing.
Driving home, he wonders how many more days he can take before quitting to open a bakery or becoming a hermit. Then he remembers that the bakery would need a point-of-sale system and Wi-Fi, and being a hermit would probably require online registration.
He sighs, rubs his eyes, and resolves to go back tomorrow. After all, somebody has to keep Karen from giving her PayPal credentials to the North Korean space program.